A life spent listening,
across disciplines,
across cultures,
across human lives.
Early on, I listened to my parents and to the wider culture. They steered me onto a road paved with achievement, and I followed it into the field of engineering. I earned my Ph.D. from McGill University and became a tenured professor at Colorado State University.
My research was funded by the NSF and NASA, published in more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles, collected into a book, and recognized with awards from IBM, the State of Colorado, and Colorado State University.
I waited for my success to bring belonging, connection, and meaning, because my parents and culture assured me these would all arrive together. But all that ever came was more effort, more striving, more of the same.
When it became unmistakably clear that the road I'd followed, paved with achievement, would never take me where my heart wanted to live, I stepped away from engineering and turned toward a different path.
I returned to school, completed graduate training in counseling and clinical psychology, and, while practicing as a therapist, pursued an eight-year international training program that certified me as a clinical trainer and supervisor.
And for more than twenty-five years, I sat with people as their lives unfolded in my therapy office — more than ten thousand individuals, couples, and families. Their stories were deeply personal and distinct, but hidden beneath the surface, they all carried the same aching refrain: I did everything they asked of me. Why am I still so exhausted? Why am I still so alone?
People's ache was so widespread, shared silently by so many, that my solo practice was much too small to address it. So I built something bigger. Within six years, I was the founder and CEO of Colorado's largest outpatient counseling organization, made up of more than two hundred clinicians and fifty support staff, rooted in a culture of transparency, inclusivity, and community.
From that vantage point, overseeing the work of hundreds of clinicians whose care touched hundreds of thousands of lives, I witnessed something extraordinary: one unmistakable pattern repeating on a remarkable scale, visible across a quarter million lives and rippling across communities and generations.
I handed leadership of the organization to a national healthcare system and entered a period of reflection and research. And then I began to write, slowly giving words to the pattern that had been revealing itself.
I wrote regularly for Psychology Today, where my work was often featured as an Essential Read. I was drawn into conversations with USA Today, Forbes, Huffington Post and Discovery Magazine. In those pages and dialogues, my voice emerged. I learned to name how culture was silently reshaping our inner lives, how it was emptying our outer ones, and how we walk the path home, to what I call the village.
The Village Solution tells that story in full, not as a theory spoken from a distance, but as a translation of what I have lived, seen up close, and held with others.